film festivals: Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2014, France

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Paleosol, 80 South documents the area of Mount Karkom in the south of Israel, a site which was identified by archeologist Emmanuel Anati as the biblical Mount Sinai following his discovery of ancient rock drawings and different ritualistic artefacts. The area, which was occupied in recent decades by the Israeli military and used as a training zone, is home to a variety of training facilities, whose appearance is reminiscent of monumental minimalist sculptures. The work fuses two powerful myths, the militaristic and biblical, by way of combining contemporary images of Mount Karkom, filmed using a Military thermal camera, with a voice over of Emmanuel Anati’s expedition diary entries. This imbues the landscape depicted with ambiguity: a concrete wall used as a target could be either a cult object, a futuristic artefact or a minimalistic public sculpture. In between these two myths appear Bedouin metal scavengers who forage for the remains of bomb shells and saw off pieces of radar stations, hoping to sell the metal to the highest bidder – their presence and action as if deflating these “grand narratives”.